Half a century ago, as the civil rights movement grew in strength and intensity, “school choice” was understood to e a synonym for segregation. Leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fought for a democratic and equitable public school system. But, oh, how times have changed. Now there are organizations led by African Americans who want vouchers and charters to escape the public schools. No matter that such schools promote segregation. These 21st century leaders want school choice.
Why?
Julian Vasquez Heilig explains here how billionaires have co-opted minority groups to join their campaign to fight unions, fight teachers, and demand privatization.
The answer will not surprise you.
”
“Under the mantra of civil rights, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers and the powerful corporate-funded lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are using venture philanthropy and the political process to press for school reforms in the United States.
“The ongoing Vergara law case in California in which nine students are suing the state over teacher tenure laws, is backed by Student Matters, a non-profit that has received donations from the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation, run by the Walton family that founded supermarket chain Wal-Mart.
“The driver behind the case is a campaign to loosen labour rules in order to make it easier to fire “bad” teachers, under the argument that their presence discriminates against disadvantaged children. Opponents of the case argue that it is a blatant attempt to change the conversation from the realities of California’s divestment in education — the state is 46th in the nation in spending per student in 2010-11, and 50th in the number of students per teacher.
“What these organisations and other others such as the the Koch brothers, Bradley Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Students First and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education – all supposedly supporters of school reform – have as a common denominator is a vision of a profit-based market approach to education.
“School vouchers are one of the primary education reform policy approaches pressed by the billionaires and the business lobby. Voucher programs, which provide public funding for students to attend private schools, have become more popular in the US in the past several decades.”
He adds:
“….these special interests are supporting vouchers and other neoliberal reforms contrary to the interests of students of colour. In doing so they will shift the US education system to maximise corporate profits, while limiting democratic control of public schools.
“These same billionaire “reformers” have co-opted the equity discourse by offering a carrot to minority groups. This can sometimes be in the form of millions of dollars as in the case of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. But all this hides the inequity that profit-based approaches to education foment.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder why the co-opted minorities don’t realize they are being co-opted.
LikeLike
They are just like anyone else. They have given in to greed. This same thing has been done in Michigan with a minority emergency manager for Detroit who has “invisible donors” (Snyder’s right-wingers) paying for his apartment etc. They have also done this in the EAA (fiasco) in Detroit. One of the problems I see is that they use minorities and often people within the community do nothing to counter these puppets while they strip the power of the people within minority communities.
LikeLike
Martin Luther King would recognize these attempts at co-option for what they are. If minorities today don’t recognize the same, they haven’t learned their history. I sure hope minorities aren’t relying on the schools (public, charter or private) to teach such history. Traditionally such history has been, by necessity, taught through the black family (and presumably other minority families.
LikeLike
A former coworker of mine who is African American and still works in the schools was really appalled during Black History month at how little the African American kids knew about their own history. She is a devout church member as well, so she is well educated about the Civil Rights movement. She really fears what the ignorance demonstrated by students about their heritage will mean for her community. It is bad enough when the white community ignores the past; it is really worrisome when those whose parents lived it do not know their roots.
LikeLike
I think a lot of kids see it as the distant past.
LikeLike
I like that he stated that in a school choice system that schools choose. An argument I make to my conservative friends all of the time.
The school has the final say. Not the parent. In response to the query, “As a parent why shouldn’t I be able to choose where my child attends school?”, I’ve replied that in a true system of school choice that ultimately the school would choose and parents would often, possibly a majority of the time, not get into their first choice.
It would turn K-12 into college at a lower age. Schools would have admissions departments, possibly have pre-requisites for attendance (test-taking, interviews, parental agreements, fundraising requirements) and then choose who best suited them.
I have very wealthy (but politically moderate friends) who went through this process. They targeted a particular private school for their oldest child. He went through the testing and the interview process for that school at age 5. He didn’t get in. And this family is worth at least $5M. He was accepted by a different (and quite excellent) private school but they didn’t get their choice. And they’re wealthy.
What would happen to the kid from the single-parent impoverished home? And what if a child can’t get in anywhere? Would there be schools to take the kids who couldn’t land elsewhere? And what kind of future does that kid likely have?
LikeLike
Steve K: quite so.
The phrase introduced by Chiara Duggan comes in handy here: “choice not voice.”
I would only add (making it unwieldy) that a fuller version would read something like “we decide the choices you will have or not have and you have no voice to say yay or nay to them.”
This is where we can introduce Diane’s succinct rejoinder that every parent should have the choice of a well-resourced, well-supported local neighborhood public school.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
LikeLike
The Detroit News (Tea Party mouthpiece) had an editorial that supports your post.
The writer commented that the closure of Inkster Public Schools was not a big deal because parents had plenty of other choices. But apparently, Inkster Public Schools was no longer one of those options.
Yep. “We’ll decide the choices you have.”
LikeLike
Let’s simplify it, our choice is your choice. You get to live with it. What will happen when all schools are charter schools? I’ll bet “accountability” will go away. What of the kids that no charter will accept? What happens to their right to an education? Silly me, I am sure there will be a home edition of K-12 waiting for them.
LikeLike
It’s not just minority children being impacted…it’s all children, and no, we are not listening to history:
Just as trauma is passed down in families, so is EVIL. It is most apparent in those highly Narcissistic families whose history is based on power and greed. For example, take a good look at the Bush family back to Prescott Bush, and his efforts to fuel the Nazi war machine. Take a good look at ex-President George Bush’s immoral leadership. Take a good look now at Jeb Bush’s efforts to gain power and political support in the trough of the Educational Industrial Complex.
The hidden agenda of this education reform movement has roots in the eugenics movement in the US which became a model for that in Germany prior to WWII. The curriculum of Common Core is not based on sound educational philosophy or knowledge of children’s developmental needs, it is based on power and greed. It is based on control, and creating the slave workers of the future totalitarian regime. It is a poisonous pedagogy.
The “Christian Right” conditions children not to think for themselves, but to accept and believe what they are told. They are conditioned to believe whatever their “Christian Authoritarian Leader” tells them to believe, no matter how ridiculous or absurd that leader’s interpretation of the bible may be. They are conditioned to become obedient “sheep”, without recognizing whether the authority is abusive or insane. That is the hallmark of the Common Core – It creates children and adults who are not able to use scientific thinking, or higher level thinking skills to perceive reality in their environment.
We are allowing our children to be conditioned in a system that is leading them down a path that is the educational political version of “Jim Jones”. This is not a result of one political party, it is not partisan, it is the overall conformity that has been conditioned into our children via the increasingly authoritarian pedagogy in public education and US politics for several decades since WWII. It has now reached a level of destruction of the mental health of the nation’s children, while the general population looks on like helplessness bystanders.
As parents who have first hand observation of the environment and curriculum of Common Core, we can see that it is age inappropriate and creates chronic stress for our children, as well as for the teachers. If we put on our “thinking caps”, we can see this is permanent psychological damage being done to our children. However, “we” are now the sheep. Those 1% with all the money and power in this country are in control.
The destruction to our nation’s children from the educational reform disaster that is Common Core is beyond any other disaster our nation has ever faced. It is the manifestation of Nikita Khrushchev’s prediction in a speech given at the UN during the early years of the cold war:
“America will fall without a shot being fired. It will fall from within.”
Our best hope is to dismantle the toxic Common Core education reform movement and save our children from being turned into inhuman Nazis. We must give our children a safe and nurturing environment that will allow them to become strong leaders with empathy, and not turned into robots. It is our only hope to preserve their humanity and the future of our democracy.
LikeLike
The so-called reformers tell many lies and commit many despicable acts every day, but among the worst is their use of poor, minority children as props in their hostile takeover of the public schools.
LikeLike
The prime example of Julian’s article, wherein he writes about the California Vergara case and how the millionaires behind it manipulate the inner city parents, is the charade of last Oct. 29 at LAUSD in Los Angeles. The powerful law and PR firms who work for these same billionaires (Broad, Welch, Murdoch, Waltons, etc.), worked to stage the phony media-directed performance of ‘parents’ who were bussed in to carry signs and shout chants to laud Deasy on the day the BoE was to decide whether or not to renew his contract for another 3 years. They signed that contract of infamy and they keep adding additional perks to his salary.
I was there and saw all of this first hand, and thereafter reported on it. I will not repeat all the egregious things that happened on that day.
It was clear to those of us in attendance that the BoE had colluded with Deasy and Broad’s ‘secret’ agents, Parent Revolution and United Way (and even California Endowment), to give Deasy another golden contract despite that only weeks before the teachers of LAUSD had voted 91% against him in a vote of NO CONFIDENCE, and despite that the public called for his dismissal after the iPad debacle.
I, and others, have reported on this abuse of power both here on Diane’s site (and you can find these reports in her archives) and on other blogs sites which can be found by googling.
Deasy is rapidly supporting/embedding charters and also firing teachers for a multitude of trumped up charges. His power eminates from his bosses, the billionaires we all know are in the process of taking over America….for profit. The phony ‘parents’ meetings he has set up only allow his supporters to partipate. This whole arrogant display makes it clear that these oligarchs have the cash, the determination, the connections, and the evil designs to take over our public education, and all other public entities such as postal service, medical care, social agencies (Medicare, Social Security) paid for by the workers/users, transportation, water and power sources, and make them all private enterprise ‘for profit’ agencies.
They, and Grover Norquist and the hedge fund managers and Wall Street, have indeed drowned government in the bathtub.
LikeLike
addendum…
Yesterday I was at a Dem Club meeting in LA to honor 40 year Congressman Henry Waxman who is not running for office again. Waxman has been a liberal cheerleader for decades and wrote and carried more bills than any other person in the body politic.
During Q and A, I asked him to please expand on his views about what Obama and Duncan were doing to foster the rapid expansion of charter schools across the country, and escpecially since California and LA lead the nation in the proliferation of charter schools.
He looked pained at the question and proceeded to do a 5 minute rationale about education not being his area of expertise. He ended with one sentence that brought tears to my eyes…the unkindest cut of all.
He said, “but I really like charter schools”….so I am left with that last remark as my memory of this venerated politician.
LikeLike
I appreciate billionaires weighing in on educational reform. I want them as a voice for the poor children that I serve. My concern is that they may not study the issue enough to understand that there are children that won’t benefit from free market principles because their parents who make the decisions are unwilling or incapable of investing in their children enough to find the best school and hold that school accountable. My hope is that if we infuse free market accountability and marketability into education, that we do so with a clearly articulated plan for providing high quality education to the children who are most vulnerable to perpetuating poverty and illiteracy because of the example set for them by their parents.
LikeLike